Gary Hall
Gary Hall is a writer, philosopher and cultural theorist working in the areas of media, politics and technology. He is Professor of Media in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at Coventry University, UK, where he directs the Centre for Postdigital Cultures (a disruptive iteration of the Centre for Disruptive Media he directed previously), and the postdigital arts and humanities research studio The Post Office. He is the author of a number of books, including The Inhumanist Manifesto (Techne Lab, 2017), Pirate Philosophy (MIT Press, 2016), The Uberfication of the University (Minnesota UP, 2016), Digitize This Book! (Minnesota UP, 2008), and Culture in Bits (Continuum, 2002). He is also co-author of Públicos Fantasma - La Naturaleza Política Del Libro - La Red (Taller de Ediciones Económicas, 2016) and Open Education: A Study In Disruption (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2014), and co-editor of Experimenting (Fordham UP, 2007) and New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh UP, 2006).
In 1999 he co-founded the critical theory journal Culture Machine. In 2006 he co-founded an open access publishing house Open Humanities Press (OHP), which he still co-directs. He also co-edits OHP's Liquid Books series and the Jisc-funded Living Books About Life series.
He has given lectures and seminars at institutions around the world, including the Australian National University, Columbia University, University of Heidelberg, K.U. Leuven, Lund University, Monash University, New York University, the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and the Wellcome Collection in London. With over thirty peer-reviewed publications in edited books and academic journals including American Literature, Angelaki, Cultural Studies, New Formations, and Radical Philosophy, his work has been translated into Chinese, French, Japanese, Turkish, Russian, Spanish and Slovenian.
He is currently developing a series of politico-institutional interventions that draw on digital media to actualise, or creatively perform, critical theory in relation to the city, the gig economy, and public institutions such as the library and university. He is also completing two new monographs: Machine Working: From ÜberCapitalism to Data Commonism; and Masked Media.
More on: www.garyhall.info
In 1999 he co-founded the critical theory journal Culture Machine. In 2006 he co-founded an open access publishing house Open Humanities Press (OHP), which he still co-directs. He also co-edits OHP's Liquid Books series and the Jisc-funded Living Books About Life series.
He has given lectures and seminars at institutions around the world, including the Australian National University, Columbia University, University of Heidelberg, K.U. Leuven, Lund University, Monash University, New York University, the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and the Wellcome Collection in London. With over thirty peer-reviewed publications in edited books and academic journals including American Literature, Angelaki, Cultural Studies, New Formations, and Radical Philosophy, his work has been translated into Chinese, French, Japanese, Turkish, Russian, Spanish and Slovenian.
He is currently developing a series of politico-institutional interventions that draw on digital media to actualise, or creatively perform, critical theory in relation to the city, the gig economy, and public institutions such as the library and university. He is also completing two new monographs: Machine Working: From ÜberCapitalism to Data Commonism; and Masked Media.
More on: www.garyhall.info
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Books by Gary Hall
In Pirate Philosophy, Gary Hall considers whether the fight against the neoliberal corporatization of higher education in fact requires scholars to transform their own lives and labor. Is there a way for philosophers and theorists to act not just for or with the antiausterity and student protestors—“graduates without a future”—but in terms of their political struggles? Drawing on such phenomena as peer-to-peer file sharing and anticopyright/pro-piracy movements, Hall explores how those in academia can move beyond finding new ways of thinking about the world to find instead new ways of being theorists and philosophers in the world.
Hall describes the politics of online sharing, the battles against the current intellectual property regime, and the actions of Anonymous, LulzSec, Aaron Swartz, and others, and he explains Creative Commons and the open access, open source, and free software movements. But in the heart of the book he considers how, when it comes to scholarly ways of creating, performing, and sharing knowledge, philosophers and theorists can challenge not just the neoliberal model of the entrepreneurial academic but also the traditional humanist model with its received ideas of proprietorial authorship, the book, originality, fixity, and the finished object. In other words, can scholars and students today become something like pirate philosophers?
Gary Hall presents a timely and ambitious polemic on the potential that open access publishing has to transform both “papercentric” humanities scholarship and the institution of the university itself. Rigorously interrogating the intellectual, political, and ethical implications of open access, Digitize This Book! is a radical call for democratizing access to knowledge and transforming the structures of academic and institutional authority and legitimacy.
What for decades could only be dreamt of is now almost within reach: the widespread provision of free online education, regardless of a student’s geographic location, financial status or ability to access conventional institutions of learning. Yet for all the hype-cycle that has been entered into over MOOCs, TED Talks, Khan Academy, Wikiversity et al, many experiments with Open Education (OE) do not appear to be designed to challenge the becoming business of the university or alter Higher Education in any fundamental way. If anything, they seem more likely to lead to a two-tier system, in which those who can’t afford to pay (so much) to attend a traditional university, or belong to those groups who prefer not to move away from home (e.g. lower-income families), have to make do with a poor, online, second-rate alternative education produced by a global corporation.
CONTENTS
Preface/ 1 The University in the 21st Century/ 2 A Radically Different Model of Education and the University/ 3 The Educational Context/ 4 Open Education/ 5 Open Education Typologies/ 6 Towards a Philosophy of Open Education/ Conclusion: Diverse ‘disruption’/ Bibliography/Index
Table Of Contents
Preface
1. Some Frequently Asked Questions
2. "It's a Thin Line Between Love and Hate" Why Cultural Studies is So "Naff"
3. "Something Else Besides" The Third Way of Angela McRobbie
4. The Monstrous Future of Cultural Studies
5. Beyond Marxism and Psychoanalysis
6. www.culturalstudies.ac.uk
Papers by Gary Hall
In Pirate Philosophy, Gary Hall considers whether the fight against the neoliberal corporatization of higher education in fact requires scholars to transform their own lives and labor. Is there a way for philosophers and theorists to act not just for or with the antiausterity and student protestors—“graduates without a future”—but in terms of their political struggles? Drawing on such phenomena as peer-to-peer file sharing and anticopyright/pro-piracy movements, Hall explores how those in academia can move beyond finding new ways of thinking about the world to find instead new ways of being theorists and philosophers in the world.
Hall describes the politics of online sharing, the battles against the current intellectual property regime, and the actions of Anonymous, LulzSec, Aaron Swartz, and others, and he explains Creative Commons and the open access, open source, and free software movements. But in the heart of the book he considers how, when it comes to scholarly ways of creating, performing, and sharing knowledge, philosophers and theorists can challenge not just the neoliberal model of the entrepreneurial academic but also the traditional humanist model with its received ideas of proprietorial authorship, the book, originality, fixity, and the finished object. In other words, can scholars and students today become something like pirate philosophers?
Gary Hall presents a timely and ambitious polemic on the potential that open access publishing has to transform both “papercentric” humanities scholarship and the institution of the university itself. Rigorously interrogating the intellectual, political, and ethical implications of open access, Digitize This Book! is a radical call for democratizing access to knowledge and transforming the structures of academic and institutional authority and legitimacy.
What for decades could only be dreamt of is now almost within reach: the widespread provision of free online education, regardless of a student’s geographic location, financial status or ability to access conventional institutions of learning. Yet for all the hype-cycle that has been entered into over MOOCs, TED Talks, Khan Academy, Wikiversity et al, many experiments with Open Education (OE) do not appear to be designed to challenge the becoming business of the university or alter Higher Education in any fundamental way. If anything, they seem more likely to lead to a two-tier system, in which those who can’t afford to pay (so much) to attend a traditional university, or belong to those groups who prefer not to move away from home (e.g. lower-income families), have to make do with a poor, online, second-rate alternative education produced by a global corporation.
CONTENTS
Preface/ 1 The University in the 21st Century/ 2 A Radically Different Model of Education and the University/ 3 The Educational Context/ 4 Open Education/ 5 Open Education Typologies/ 6 Towards a Philosophy of Open Education/ Conclusion: Diverse ‘disruption’/ Bibliography/Index
Table Of Contents
Preface
1. Some Frequently Asked Questions
2. "It's a Thin Line Between Love and Hate" Why Cultural Studies is So "Naff"
3. "Something Else Besides" The Third Way of Angela McRobbie
4. The Monstrous Future of Cultural Studies
5. Beyond Marxism and Psychoanalysis
6. www.culturalstudies.ac.uk
A new generation has begun to emerge from the shadow of the Birmingham School: a generation who have turned to theory as a means to think through some of the crucial problems and issues in contemporary culture. New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory collects for the first time the ideas of this generation and explains just why theory continues to be crucial for cultural studies.
The book explores theory's past, present and most especially future role in cultural studies. It does so by providing an authoritative and accessible guide, for students and researchers alike, to:
* some of the most interesting members of this 'post-Birmingham school' generation
* the thinkers and theories currently influencing new work in cultural studies: Agamben, Badiou, Deleuze, Derrida, Hardt and Negri, Kittler, Laclau, Levinas, Zizek
* the new territories being mapped out across the intersections of cultural studies and cultural theory: anti-capitalism, ethics, the posthumanities, post-Marxism, new media technologies, the transnational.
CONTENTS
1. Introduction: New Cultural Studies (Clare Birchall and Gary Hall)
Part 1: New Adventures in Theory
2. Cultural Studies and Deconstruction (Gary Hall)
3. Cultural Studies and Post-Marxism (Jeremy Valentine)
4. Cultural Studies and Ethics (Joanna Zylinska)
5. Cultural Studies and German Media Theory (Geoffrey Winthrop-Young)
Part 2: New Theorists
6. Cultural Studies and Gilles Deleuze (Gregory J. Seigworth)
7. Cultural Studies and Giorgio Agamben (Brett Neilson)
8. Cultural Studies and Alain Badiou (Julian Murphet)
9. Cultural Studies and Slavoj Zizek (Paul Bowman)
Part 3: New Transformations
10. Cultural Studies and Anti-Capitalism (Jeremy Gilbert)
11. Cultural Studies and the Transnational (Imre Szeman)
12. Cultural Studies and New Media (Caroline Bassett)
Part 4: New Adventures in Cultural Studies
13. Cultural Studies and Rem Koolhaas' Project on the City (J. McGregor Wise)
14. Cultural Studies and the Post-Human(ities) (Neil Badmington)
15. Cultural Studies and the Extreme (Dave Boothroyd)
16. Cultural Studies and the Secret (Clare Birchall)
Weber played an important role in the process of translation, publication, and interpretation that brought "theory" to prominence in the United States. His work continues to reactivate and transform the legacy bequeathed to us by figures such as Kant, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger, de Man, and Derrida, not least by exposing the field of philosophy to contemporary questions in the arenas of media, technology, politics, and culture.
This volume brings together a number of eminent scholars seeking to assess the intellectual impact of Weber's large body of writings. It also contains two new and previously unpublished essays by Weber himself: "'God Bless America!'" and "'Going Along for the Ride: Violence and Gesture-Agamben Reading Benjamin Reading Kafka Reading Cervantes.'"
CONTENTS
Introduction: Experimenting / Simon Morgan Wortham and Gary Hall.
"God bless America!" / Samuel Weber.
Of debts, dreams, and jokes : or, weberian theatricality / Simon Morgan Wortham.
Technica speciosa : some notes on the ambivalence of technics in Kant and Weber / Peter Fenves.
Surfing technics : direction and dispersion in the age of information / R.L. Rutsky.
IT, again : how to build an ethical virtual institution / Gary Hall.
Ambivalence : media, technics, gender / Marc Redfield.
Modernism and the medium : on Greenberg and Weber / Andrew McNamara.
It walks : the ambulatory uncanny / Susan Bernstein.
On risk-taking in the psychoanalytic text : the reality test / Avital Ronell.
Going along for the ride : violence and gesture : Agamben reading Benjamin reading Kafka reading Cervantes / Samuel Weber.
The editors are particularly keen for users to contribute to the section on alternative platforms, to raise awareness about the not-for-profit, institutionally supported and/or scholarly-led alternative initiatives for sharing and discussing research.
*** To view the book, click on the URL above. ***
Digitize Me, Visualize Me, Search Me can be accessed here:
http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Digitize_Me,_Visualize_Me,_Search_Me
PHOTOMEDIATIONS: AN OPEN BOOK
http://photomediationsopenbook.net/
Trailer:
https://vimeo.com/124738389
Through a comprehensive introduction and four specially commissioned chapters on light, movement, hybridity and networks that include over 200 images, Photomediations: An Open Book tells a unique story about the relationship between photography and other media. The book’s four main chapters are followed by three ‘open’ chapters, which will be populated with further content over the next 18 months. The three open chapters are made up of a social space, an online exhibition and an open reader. A version of the reader, featuring academic and curatorial texts on photomediations, will be published in a stand-alone book form later in 2015, in collaboration with Open Humanities Press.
Photomediations: An Open Book’s online form allows for easy sharing of its content with educators, students, publishers, museums and galleries, as well as any other interested parties. Promoting the socially significant issues of ‘open access’, ‘open scholarship’ and ‘open education’, the project also explores a low-cost hybrid publishing model as an alternative to the increasingly threatened traditional publishing structures.
Photomediations: An Open Book is a collaboration between academics from Goldsmiths, University of London, and Coventry University. It is part of Europeana Space, a project funded by the European Union's ICT Policy Support Programme under GA n° 621037. It is also a sister project to the curated online site Photomediations Machine: http://photomediationsmachine.net
Project team: Professor Joanna Zylinska, Dr Kamila Kuc, Jonathan Shaw, Ross Varney, Dr Michael Wamposzyc. Project advisor: Professor Gary Hall.
Visit Photomediations: An Open Book: http://photomediationsopenbook.net
Follow us on Twitter: @photomediations
For further enquiries please contact: [email protected]
Last month we organised a symposium on the subject of academic social networking and publishing platforms titled “Why Are We Not Boycotting Academia.edu?”. Chaired by Janneke Adema (Coventry University, UK), the event featured Pascal Aventurier (INRA, France), Kathleen Fitzpatrick (MLA/Coventry University, US), Gary Hall (Coventry University, UK), and David Parry (Saint Joseph University, US) as speakers.
The videos from this symposium are now available online at:
https://archive.org/details/Boycottingacademiaedu
This is all the more surprising given that when Elsevier bought the academic social network Mendeley in 2013 (it was suggested at the time that Elsevier was mainly interested in acquiring Mendeley’s user data), many academics deleted their profiles out of protest. Yet generating revenue from the exploitation of user data is exactly the business model underlying academic social networks such as Academia.edu.
This event will ask, why have researchers been so ready to campaign against for-profit academic publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, and Taylor & Francis/Informa, but not against for-profit platforms such as Academia.edu ResearchGate and Google Scholar?
The speakers are: Pascal Aventurier (INRA, France), Kathleen Fitzpatrick (MLA/Coventry University, US), Gary Hall (Coventry University, UK), David Parry (Saint Joseph’s University, US). It is chaired by Janneke Adema (Coventry University, UK)
In this interview, Gary Hall argues that if we are to move to a post-capitalist society, we need to experiment with new ways of working that are based less on ideas of self-centred individualism, competition and celebrity, and more on openness, collaboration and the gift. The university, he suggests, is somewhere we can actualise such alternative modes of being and doing, as it is one of the few spaces in post-industrial society where the forces of contemporary neoliberalism are still being overtly opposed, to a certain extent at least. A persona he proposes we adopt in order to do so is that of the pirate, this being for him someone who tries, teases and troubles as well as attacks our existing economic, legal and political models.
'Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control"' first appeared in Culture Machine 11, 2010. It is accompanied by an introductory essay:
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/384/407
Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and published by Open Humanities Press (OHP) (http://openhumanitiespress.org), Living Books About Life is a series of curated, open access books about life -- with life understood both philosophically and biologically -- which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Produced by a globally-distributed network of writers and editors, the books in the series repackage existing open access science research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life: e.g., air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.
By creating twenty one ‘living books about life’ in just seven months, the series represents an exciting new model for publishing, in a sustainable, low-cost manner, many more such books in the future. These books can be freely shared with other academic and non-academic institutions and individuals. Taken together, they constitute an engaging interdisciplinary resource for researching and teaching relevant science issues across the humanities, a resource that is capable of enhancing the intellectual and pedagogic experience of working with open access materials.
All the books in the series are themselves ‘living’, in the sense that they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers. As well as repackaging open access science research -- along with interactive maps, visualisations, podcasts and audio-visual material -- into a series of books, Living Books About Life is thus engaged in rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data and e-book readers such as Kindle and the iPad.
Many thinkers, for example, are currently attempting to replace the tyranny of the human with an emphasis on the nonhuman, the posthuman and the Anthropocene. Yet such ‘post-theory’ theorists continue to remain bound up with the human in the very performance of their attempts to think through and beyond it. Regardless of the anti-humanist philosophies they profess — be they inspired by Deleuze, Kittler or Latour — in their practices, in the forms their work takes, in the ways they create, publish and disseminate it, in their associated upholding of notions of individual human rights, freedom, property and so on, they continue to operate in terms of a liberal, humanist model of what it is to be and do as a theorist.
‘On the Obsolescence of Bourgeois Theory in the Anthropocene’ however asks, what forms is critical theory to take if, in its performance, it is not to be simply liberal and humanist — nor indeed human — but something else besides?
'On the Obsolescence of Bourgeois Theory in the Anthropocene' was first published on my Media Gifts blog (http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal) on June 13, 2018:
http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2018/6/12/on-the-obsolescence-of-bourgeois-theory-in-the-anthropocene.html
It is part of my current work in progress for a book with the provisional title of Masked Media: or How To Be Inhuman.